Is Jesse Ridgway A Fraud Or Something A Psychotherapist Would Diagnose?

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today.
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:15)
All right, I'm gonna ask you a question here at the beginning of this piece, and I'm gonna ask it again at the end. And I want you to notice how your answer may or may not change, all right? And as we go through this, I want you to write down your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. The links are in the description. Lots of buzz online about these two as of right now. And I thought this should be kind of a good see something, say something sort of episode.
Because there's something not right here. All right, here's your question before I get too far down a bit of a rabbit hole. Is Jesse Ridgway a fraud? Or is there something actually wrong with him? Because there seems to be about two optional lanes, and those are them. Fraud, mentally ill. Maybe a little bit of both. This is an opinion piece, by the way. This is in my opinion. This is allegedly, this is all of that.
Because fraud, and something actually wrong with you, driving this type of behavior, are two very different things. We're going to get into it right now. I'm curious, like I said, to get your thoughts on what the hell this cornucopia of wrong is, that continues to come out of this man's devices for attention. A fraud knows what he's doing. A fraud can stop. And the more I look at Jesse Ridgway's record, not the last week, not the last month, but the last 20 years, the less I think this is a man who won't stop. I think this is a man who can't. And that's scarier. Because a fraud burns out eventually. Whatever Jesse Ridgway is, he's never burned out. He's only gotten worse. And every person who gets close to him allegedly pays for it. Let me show you what I mean. Between 2012 and 2016, Jesse Ridgway ran a YouTube series called Psycho Series. This is good information because if you're new to Jesse Ridgway, which I was, I didn't know who the hell this guy was from Adam, and you start digging into his history and his patterns of behavior, all of this starts to make a lot more sense, and eventually you go, why am I wasting my time on this? So let me help you not waste any more of your time on this. So between 2012 and 2016, he ran a YouTube series called Psycho Series, 684 episodes. His father smashing his gaming equipment, screaming matches, physical confrontations, staged on-camera murder in the finale. All of it, fake, fake, fake. All of it presented as real. I mean, if you had any common sense and watched this guy's videos, I watched a few of them to get some context. Horrible acting. I mean, it's clearly, I don't know, to me, it's clearly people that are staging something, but many believed, because it was presented as real. Just like his pregnancy with the Down syndrome baby that they aborted. Supposedly real. And over those four years, over a thousand people picked up the phone and called 911 because they believed a young man was being terrorized by his father. He pitched it, he presented it, people believed it, and they literally called the police. Thousands of them, real human beings who saw something on their screen and cared enough about a stranger to call for help. Women who are probably a lot like you, mothers, sisters, people who know what it looks like when something in a family is being hurt. They call because they gave a damn. And Jesse Ridgway knew the calls were coming in. He knew, for four years, he knew people were scared for him. And he let it continue because their fear was generating a billion views and paying for his life.
Here's the part that matters. When it was finally revealed as fake, Jesse Ridgway said, I never lied. I was playing a character. He apologized, not to a single person who called the police, not to one mother who lost sleep, not one word of acknowledgement that those people's fear was real and he was turning it into a payday, even if the show wasn't. He just called it art and moved on.
Is that art or is that personality, mental disorder, with a YouTube channel? I need you to ask yourself, not whether that's dishonest. Obviously, it's dishonest. Ask yourself what kind of person can watch a thousand people call the police out of genuine fear for him and feel nothing? What kind of person processes that information? A thousand human beings scared enough to pick up the phone and call 9-1-1 and the only thing they take away from it is, wow, my show is working. That's not a con artist. A con artist at least understands that the people he's deceiving are real. This is something else. This is a person who does not experience other people's feelings as real. You, you're watching him, your data, your metrics, your proof the performance is landing, but you're not real to him. And you've never been real to him. In my opinion, I don't. If you really dive deep into psychology, if someone who I think he is the type of personality I think he has, in my opinion, these people don't feel empathy. They're empty shells. Corey Richins is a fine example. Alec Murdaugh, another fine example. We have hundreds of them that we cover on the show every single day.